Tag Archive: Last Hope

Last Hope is a medical suspense drama centered on a team at a biomedical research and innovation institute that serves as the last hope for patients with life-threatening conditions. The members of the team all have their own particular issues, and we mainly find out about these issues through flashbacks. The flashbacks are so frequent that instead of writing “there was another flashback” or something similar every time, I’m just going to put “Flashback (Character, Year):” to keep things tighter.

For the first time in this episode, we actually start away from the hospital, with a character we don’t know (played by Ishida Hikari from Beginners!). She seems to be in charge off a design shop, and barely gets through telling her staff off . . .

. . . before she collapses.

I think starting the episode by giving us some sense of the patient as a human being is important. They haven’t done nearly enough to win the viewer’s sympathy for the patients in previous episodes because so much of the attention is on the doctors. The result is that we don’t end up caring whether the patient makes it through or not – only whether the doctors will be vindicated.

Actually, I can’t say the show really gets us to root for the doctors, either. After all, the first time we see one, it’s the completely distasteful Takagi (Tanabe Seiichi) trying to pick up another woman.

We have a lot of characters to deal with in Last Hope, but it looks like the writers are mostly focusing on one character at a time now, while also adding extra details about the main character – Hatano Takumi (Aiba Masaki) – in each hour. Hatano’s story seems to be the main overarching plot. This episode focuses more on Ogiwara Yukiyo (Koike Eiko). Will we get a satisfying picture of her, or will the writers leave us with too many loose ends?

We begin, of course, with a flashback. This time, it was of the moment when Ogiwara lost her mother. Her mother collapsed on board an airplane, and there was no doctor available to help.

With that settled, why don’t we do another flashback? This time it’s Hatano’s near past, when he decides to have a talk with the Director Naruse (Takashima Masahiro) about why Naruse hired him. After all, Hatano was just the son of a country doctor, and this is an institute of cutting-edge medicine.

After the first episode of Last Hope, I decided that I couldn’t review it fairly without subtitles. Fortunately, miyase-subs at livejournal decided to pick it up, so as the subs are released, I’ll do the reviews. So far, miyase-subs is up to episode 2, so here we go.

The episode begins with a flashback to Tachibana Ayumi (Tabe Mikako)’s school days, when some sort of tragedy forced her to change her name and residence. We got a hint of this in the first episode where half the show (and perhaps the more interesting half) was about the past of the doctors working at the IBRI.

In the present, Hatano Takumi (Aiba Masaki) hands Tachibana a case file with some ominous implications for the patient (we don’t find out what those are yet – we just see the expression on Tachibana’s face).

Meanwhile, the other doctors are . . . well, they seem to be waiting for something to do. The seemingly serious Komaki (Kohinata Fumiyo) is trying to figure out how best to add a walk-in closet to his house for his wife using a 3-D computer model.

Last Hope is a medical suspense drama centered on a team at a biomedical research and innovation institute that serves as the last hope for patients with life-threatening conditions. The members of the team all have their own particular issues, and presumably we’ll see how their characters develop over the course of the series.

Unlike most of the prominent dramas this season, Last Hope is only getting subbed by a closed community, so it might be hard for English speakers to enjoy. I got a copy with Japanese subs so that I can at least use a dictionary for some things, but how much I look up will depend on how interesting things get, and there’s a lot of technical terminology that my app will likely have trouble coping with.

We begin in 1985, where we see a surgeon getting ready for surgery. This episode has a number of flashbacks meant to show something of the backgrounds of the characters and those issues I mentioned.

Then we return to the present where a man is attempting to commit suicide by stepping in front of a train. He’s pulled back by his girlfriend, who has a marriage license in hand. He says it’s impossible and starts coughing up blood.

That takes us to the institute, where its chief, Naruse Tetsuji (Takashima Masahiro) is leading a little tour.